Green, Grant

Contemporary Black Biography
COPYRIGHT 2005 Thomson Gale

Grant Green

1935–1979

Jazz guitarist

Although Grant Green recorded more than 100 albums, including 30 as the group leader, his career was overshadowed by more successful jazz guitarists, particularly Wes Montgomery and George Benson. Known for his clear, single-note, melodic style of playing with a pick, Green avoided the chords and octaves favored by his contemporaries and was renowned for his unique tone. He was a major force in the evolution of the guitar as a lead instrument and he influenced a generation of guitar players including Carlos Santana, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and George Benson himself. Green always played to his audience, with a variety that ranged from straight-ahead jazz standards, bebop, soul, gospel, Latin, country-western, to funk. He covered the Beatles, James Brown, The Jackson 5, and Mozart. But whatever he played, his music remained rooted in the blues. Green played a green guitar, wore green suits, drove a green Cadillac, and his song and album titles often played on his name. During the 1990s Green was rediscovered and dubbed the father of "acid jazz" and his recordings reissued.

Raised on the Blues

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 6, 1935, Grant was the only child of Martha, a homemaker, and John Green, a laborer, security guard, and parking-lot owner. Grant's father bought him a beat-up guitar and amplifier and, together with an uncle, taught him to play the blues. Grant plucked his ukulele in his elementary-school classroom, played drums in the school drum and bugle corps, and sang in the choir. His early influences included pioneering electric guitarist Charlie Christian, but he mainly listened to horn players, especially Charlie Parker, the originator of bebop.

By the age of 13, Grant Green was playing guitar professionally in churches, with a gospel group, and with accordionist Joe Murphy. Although he briefly studied guitar with Forest Alcorn, Green was primarily self-taught. With his parents' support, he dropped out of school before the ninth grade. Soon he was playing with jazz and rhythm and blues combos, including groups led by trumpeter Harry Edison and saxophonist Jimmy Forrest, and was a well-known figure in the St. Louis music scene. Jazz drummer Elvin Jones first heard Green in 1956. Years later, Jones told Sharony Andrews Green, Grant Green's biographer and his son Grant Jr.'s former wife: "I had never heard anybody play with that kind of purity … I always felt that this was a great artist …."

Green married Annie Maude Moody. Among his well-known tributes to her were "Miss Ann's Tempo" and "Blues in Maude's Flat." Their first child, Gregory, was born in 1956, and the couple would have three more. Gregory Green and his three younger siblings were raised primarily by their two sets of grandparents in St. Louis. Green's personal life was filled with conflicting issues. He was using heroin by his late teens, and later drugs and his gigs kept him from spending much time with his family. But Green was not an apathetic person; he held strong beliefs and was among the musicians who founded the first St. Louis chapter of the Nation of Islam, a black separatist Islamic sect.

Succeeded and Crashed in New York City

Grant Green's first recordings were a 1959 Delmark album with Jimmy Forrest and Elvin Jones and a 1960 recording on Argo with organist Sam Lazar. Green was 24 in 1959, when saxophonist Lou Donaldson first heard him play in St. Louis. The following year, Donaldson took Green to New York City to audition for Blue Note Records, the premier jazz label of the era. He was hired immediately as the staff guitarist. Green's first recording for Blue Note was Lou Donaldson's Here 'Tis in January of 1961. Five days later he was recording his first album as leader. During 1961 Green recorded eight sessions for 17 Blue Note albums, as a sideman or leader, including his first live recording, with saxophonist Stanley Turrentine. The following year he recorded a Latin album, a gospel album, and a jazz rendering of country-western music.

Between 1961 and 1965 Green recorded with almost every Blue Note musician, on more albums than any other artist at the label. He recorded frequently with organists Jack McDuff and Larry Young, as well as pianists Sonny Clark and McCoy Tyner and tenor saxophonists Hank Mobley and Joe Henderson. Many critics consider his Idle Moments from 1964 to be his all-time best album. Meanwhile Green was becoming a force in New York's live jazz scene.

By 1966 Green had grown frustrated with his meager earnings. Blue Note could record cheaply but lacked the resources to promote their albums. He left Blue Note and recorded a few sessions on the Verve label. However, like most jazz musicians, Green rarely received royalties for his original compositions. Since he could not read music well, he got very little studio work.

As his drug habit escalated out of control, so did his debts. Drugs interfered with his live performances and he gained a reputation for not paying his musicians after gigs. In 1968 Green received a brief prison sentence for drug possession. Rather than reporting to prison, he left for a gig in California. Federal agents waited until he finished his set before arresting him and escorting him to prison for a longer sentence.

Turned to Popular Music

Green had always loved James Brown. By 1965 he was moving more toward pop music and funk. After his release from prison, Green returned to Blue Note to make more commercial recordings that received radio play. Between 1969 and 1973 Green's records not only scored high on the jazz charts, they hit the rhythm and blues and soul charts as well. Some critics accused him of selling out to commercialism. Green told Guitar Player in January of 1975: "You have to be a businessman first, and an artist along with it. You can't play something people dislike and stay in business."

For the first time, Green's family joined him in New York, settling in Brooklyn where his wife took a job with the New York Model Cities agency. The reunion didn't work out. An aunt found the children living alone and she took the youngest, Grant Jr., to California for the summer. Green and Moody divorced. Moody remarried and took the other children to live in Jamaica with her new husband.

However by 1970 Green had made enough money at Blue Note to leave New York and buy a home in Detroit, Michigan, where his children joined him. The family played music in their basement and Green became a local star. His friends included city commissioners and Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, and he played regular benefits for local black organizations. Green continued to follow Muslim traditions, for a time eating mostly kosher and East Indian foods. However his penchant for women made him unwelcome at the black Muslim mosque. Around this time, drugs again distracted Green when he took up using cocaine and a codeine syrup.

His Health Deteriorated

In 1971 Green was asked to record the soundtrack for the film The Final Comedown. He began dreaming of becoming an arranger and producer. His last album for Blue Note, Live at the Lighthouse, was recorded in Hermosa Beach, California, in 1972.

By the mid-1970s Green's health was in serious decline, in part from his long battle with drugs. His failure to become a big name in music, with the accompanying financial rewards, and a series of failed relationships, further demoralized him. Green married Karen Duson Wallace, a nurse, in 1974. By 1977 the marriage had failed. Dorothy Malone became his constant companion until his death.

Green recorded his last album, Easy, in April of 1978. That autumn he had a minor stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed on his left side. A blood clot was found near his heart and the doctors ordered triple-bypass surgery, but Green refused. Instead, he drove across the country for a gig in California. After the long drive back to New York, he suffered a heart attack and died on the way to Harlem Hospital on January 31, 1979. He was 43.

Rediscovered in the 1990s

At the end of the 1980s, hip-hop musicians and rappers began using rhythm and blues and jazz from the 1960s and early 1970s, including the music of Grant Green. In the 1990s, the London hip-hop group Us3 digitally fused Green's 1970 live recording of "Sookie, Sookie" and turned it into a worldwide hit for Blue Note. Critics hailed Green as the father of acid jazz. His recordings began to be reissued and his original vinyl records became increasingly valuable among collectors.

Green's reissues were top sellers. In December of 1994, more than 30 years after Green recorded Idle Moments, the album was number 9 on Rolling Stone magazine's alternative chart of music played on college radio stations. His music was heard on movie soundtracks and "Sookie, Sookie" became a theme song on Home Box Office. Green's oldest son Gregory, a guitarist who sometimes performed under the name of his younger brother, Grant Green, Jr., could be heard on a tribute album featuring his father's compositions. During the 1990s, at least six other albums included tributes to Green.

Guitarist George Benson told Sharony Green: "People were always all over Grant. He was an icon…. Guitar players were trying to learn what his secret was, and there were people in general who just loved his groove. Grant made the guitar come alive and sing…. Only he could do it like that."

Green, Grant

Grant Green

Upon winning the new star category in Down Beat’s critics’ poll in 1962, jazz guitarist Grant Green attracted national attention as a major new force in the New York jazz scene. Green’s guitar style—rooted in the swing approach of Charlie Christian, the blues, and African American religious music—is renowned for its warm, inviting tone and flowing single-note lines.

Critically acclaimed for his work with small combos and organ trios, Green recorded with the finest musicians on the famous Blue Note label in sessions that often paired him with saxophonists Hank Mobley and Ike Quebec as well as organists Jack McDuff and Larry Young. Though his name has fallen into obscurity in recent years, Green is no stranger to die-hard jazz fans and musicians who regard him as one of the premier guitar talents of the 1960s.

Grant Green was born on June 6, 1931, in St. Louis, Missouri. Green’s father, a guitarist versed in Muddy Waters-style blues, bought him an inexpensive Harmony guitar and amplifier at an early age. After performing in a St. Louis gospel group, Green landed his first job with an accordion player, Joe Murphy, whose repertoire included gospel, boogie woogie, and rock and roll tunes. Drawn to the sounds of bebop modernism, he began to study the music of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Green recalled in Guitar Payer that “listening to Charlie [Parker] was like listening to a different man every night.” After only one year of formal study, with St. Louis musician Forrest Alcorn, Green began playing with the St. Louis bands of organist Sam Lazar and tenor saxophonist Jimmy “Night Train” Forrest, with whom Green made his recording debut on the Delmark label.

After hearing Green play in a local nightclub, jazz saxophonist and singer Lou Donaldson contacted Francis Wolff of Blue Note Records. Upon the invitation of Donaldson, Green moved to New York in 1960, and within a few months signed a contract with Blue Note. After recording an unissued date with Miles Davis’s quintet in 1961, he recorded his first album as a leader, Grant’s First Stand. The LP includes Grant’s composition “Miss Anne’s Tempo,” a driving blues that has emerged as a guitar/organ trio classic.

Following the release of the albums Green Street and Grantstand in 1961, Green recorded Born to Be Blue in 1962. His 1963 release Idle Moments, featuring tenor-saxophonist Joe Henderson and vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, has been considered by many critics as one of the finest jazz guitar records of the 1960s. Throughout the decade Green became a regular session man at Blue Note, recording on such dates as trumpeter Lee Morgan’s LP Search for the New Land.

Born June 6, 1936, in St. Louis, MO; died of a heart attack, January 31, 1979, in New York, NY. Education: Studied guitar with St. Louis musician Forrest Alcorn.

Played guitar with a gospel group and accordion player Joe Murphy; performed with the bands of organist Sam Lazar and saxophonist Jimmy “Night Train” Forrest; moved to New York and began a career as sideman and solo artist on the Blue Note label, 1960; recorded numerous sides for Blue Note before leaving the label in 1966; became inactive after recording for several smaller labels, late 1960s; returned to Blue Note, 1969; moved to Detroit, 1970; continued to record and make appearances, 1970s.

Awards: Named best new star in Down Beat critics’ poll, 1962.

Grant’s recordings and live performances soon made him a formidable talent on the New York music scene. While working at a club on 142nd Street, Green participated in “The Battle of the Guitars”—an impromptu jam session that often included guitarists Wes Montgomery and Detroit veteran Kenny Burrell, whom Green considered one of his favorite guitarists.

Though his career became overshadowed by the popularity of Wes Montgomery, Green remained a unique talent who, along with Montgomery and Burrell, formed the great triumvirate of postwar jazz guitar—a style exhibiting a strong swing/blues feel and advanced harmonic ideas. Green’s early recordings with organist Jack McDuff, trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, and Donaldson were followed, in 1964, by several sessions featuring members of John Coltrane’s legendary quartet, drummer Elvin Jones and pianist McCoy Tyner. Along with Jones and Tyner, Green recorded the outstanding albums Solid in 1964 and Matador in 1965.

In the years 1964 to 1965 and 1969 to 1972, Green recorded more than 30 sessions as a leader for the Blue Note label. His work as a sideman included dates with trumpeter Lee Morgan, pianist Herbie Hancock, saxophonists Stanley Turrentine, Ike Quebec, and Hank Mobley, and most of the label’s organists. In 1966 Green periodically left Blue Note to record on several labels, including Muse, Verve, and Cobblestone. Due to personal problems and the effects of drug addiction, Green became intermittently inactive from 1967 to 1969.

In an effort to find new artistic avenues outside New York, Green moved to Detroit in 1970, where he lived for over five years. Although he returned to the studio a number of times during the decade, his commercially oriented recordings failed to live up to the quality of his earlier work. While in New York to play an engagement at George Benson’s Breezin’ Lounge, he collapsed in his car of a heart attack and died on January 31, 1979. Survived by six children, Green was buried in his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.

Indebted to the horn-like phrasing of his early mentor Charlie Christian, Green’s guitar style is reliant on single-note phrases, rather than the chordal inflections and octave figures of his contemporaries Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell. As music producer/writer Bob Porter stated, as quoted in the liner notes of Born to Be Blue, Green had the ability to “take any good melody and make it sing.” It is this inherent skill that prompted Green to record both blues-inspired originals as well as ballads written by composers from Duke Ellington to Rogers and Hammerstein.

Like so many jazzmen, Green, after a brief, meteoric career, passed from life at an early age, leaving behind a musical legacy that became overshadowed by popular music trends and rock guitar heroes. In a review of one of Green’s performances nine months before the guitarist’s death, Gene Gray wrote in Down Beat,“Green, for those who may be unaware, does things on guitar better than anyone.” To fans and serious students of jazz guitar, Green stands as an integral figure among the blues-based modernists of the postwar era. More than ten years after his passing, Green’s guitar work remains a testament to genius—a music filled with soulful inspiration and broad artistic vision, which over time will no doubt earn its proper place in the history of modern American music.

Books

Ramsey, Doug, Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of Its Makers, University of Arkansas Press, 1989.

Periodicals

Down Beat, July 19, 1962; February 17, 1972; March 22, 1979; December 25, 1979; November 1980; April 1994.

Guitar Player, January 1975.

Additional information for this profile was obtained from the liner notes to Matador, by Michael Cuscuna;to Grant Green: The Best of Grant Green, Volume 1, by Tom Evered; and to Born to Be Blue, by Richard Seidel.

—John Cohassey

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